The Ridge Nature Preserve is located at 415 Burch Road, Fayetteville — the end of the road
Events Saturday include:
10:30 a.m.: ribbon cutting
11 a.m.: water trail ribbon cutting
11:30 a.m.: rubber duck race
Noon: guided hikes
For more information, visit www.sctlandtrust.org/2016/08/02/the-ridge-nature-area-grand-opening
A small fish popped the surface of Whitewater Creek, disturbing waters so still they’d mirrored a line of fat clouds high above Fayette County. Tami Morrs ignored it. She swept her arm toward a point downstream, where kayakers and other boaters are about to take advantage of south metro Atlanta’s newest park.
On Saturday, a 308-acre park that includes Whitewater and Gingercake creeks opens for the first time. The Ridge Nature Area, a rolling tract where once cows grazed and crops grew, has a grand-opening celebration from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free.
The hosts are the city of Fayetteville and the Southern Conservation Trust. The city donated the land, and the nonprofit trust has overseen turning former farm land into a park. It is the sixth preserve the trust has created in the south metro area.
“I’m so excited,” said Morris, chair of the trust’s board of directors. On a sweltering morning earlier this week, Morris took something of a last-minute stroll in the park. As she walked, Morris paused at trees and removed from their trunks small bits of plastic ribbon — surveyor’s tape, used to mark a trail.
It’s an excitement a long time coming. The trust, an agency dedicated to creating more park spaces in areas south of Atlanta, has been working on the grand opening for four years. It has spent about $200,000 in public and private funds to lay gravel, carve out about six miles of hiking and biking trails, build picnic tables, erect a fishing dock and create a spot where boating enthusiasts can slide kayaks or canoes into Whitewater Creek.
About two-thirds of tract is floodplain — flatlands, ringed by creeks. The remainder, about 100 acres, is on a ridge. It’s a natural display case of hard- and softwood trees, of meadow grasses and mushrooms.
For more than a decade, the site lay fallow, even as one house after another rose on the terrain nearby. The tract begins at the end of a cul-de-sac, the terminus of Burch Road.
“Basically,” said Morris, “there was nothing here.”
There’s not a whole lot more there now – and that, say boosters, is part of the park’s appeal.
Pam Young, the conservation trust’s executive director, estimated that 3 percent of the site was altered in creating the park. The road into the park once was the farm’s roadway. Trails, she said, follow the terracing of long-gone farm fields.
About 20 agencies, Young said, helped create the park with manpower, donations and building materials. Nearly 400 volunteers have helped, she said.
What is the best part about the park?
Morris: “It’s an interesting combination — all the trails we have out here.”
Young: “The educational opportunities here are huge.”
The park is open daily from dawn to dusk.
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